This book tells the story of Eyes of the City—an international exhibition on technology and urbanism held in Shenzhen during the winter of 2019 and 2020, with a curation process that unfolded between summer 2018 and spring 2020. Conceived as a cultural event exploring future scenarios in architecture and design, Eyes of the City found itself in an extraordinary, if unstable, position, enmeshed within a series of powerfully contingent events—the political turmoil in Hong Kong, the first outbreak of COVID-19 in China—that impacted not only the scope of the project, but also the global debate around society and urban space.